A real-life farce in four flops...

Just five years ago, John Cleese told an interviewer: ‘If I ever tried to do a Fawlty Towers-type sitcom again, everyone would say, "It’s not as good as Fawlty Towers’’, so there’s not much point in doing that. You have to do different things.’

The 83-year-old has clearly had a change of heart, as last night it was announced that he would be returning to Basil for an American TV series, with his character now running a boutique hotel with his daughter – played by his real-life offspring, Camilla.

Which prompts us to look back at some other attempts to reboot or remake the classic sitcom, which ran for just two series of six episodes in 1975 and 1979.

Snaveley

This was the first of three attempts by American broadcasters to adapt the show to a local market, hoping to emulate the success of previous imports  Till Death Us Do Part – remade as All In The Family – and Steptoe and Son (Stamford and Son).

A pilot for Snaveley, was shot for the ABC network in 1978, based on the Hotel Inspector episode and based in a motel located off a US highway. 

It starred Harvey Korman - who played  the villainous Hedley Lamarr in the 1974 Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles - as hotelier Henry Snavely – and future Golden Girl  Betty White as his wife Gladys. Manuel was renamed Petro, an Albanian refugee, and played by Frank LaLoggia.

The show remained relatively faithful to John Cleese and Connie Booth’s original –  Moose’s head and all – although Cleese complained that the actors ‘played it too slow and were embarrassed by the edgy dialogue’. Whatever the reason, the pilot was not picked up for a series.

Amanda’s

Cleese often recalls meeting an American TV executive who excitedly told him he’d acquired the rights to a remake, enthusing about the great plans he had for the show.

‘Have you made any changes?’ the comic asked.

‘Just one – we’ve written Basil out.’

It was all the confirmation he needed about the idiocy of Hollywood.

The result was Amanda’s, starring another future Golden Girl, Bea Arthur. She played as Amanda Cartwright, owner of Amanda's by the Sea, a struggling California seaside hotel with her son Matty (Fred McCarren).

In his definitive book about Fawlty Towers, Graham McCann describes Arthur ‘delivering each comic line with the grace and speed of an ageing oil tanker with "Joke Coming Up" painted in large white letters on its side.’ No wonder Cleese refused to have his name on the credits.

This time, Manuel was a  Mexican bellhop called Aldo, played by former Saturday Night Live cast member Tony Rosato

The show ran on ABC for ten weeks in 1983 before being pulled, with three more planned episodes in the series never making it to air.  

Payne

The last American remake, for CBS in 1999, did have Cleese’s blessing, with the star reportedly agreeing to be an ‘irregular cast member’ as a rival hotelier if Payne were renewed for a second series. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

This version starred  Night Court’s John Larroquette as hotelier Royal Payne (geddit?) and JoBeth Williams as his wife, Constance. They run the Whispering Pines Inn, where their Manuel character is an Indian bellhop called Mo, played by Rick Batalla, who is actually of Hispanic origin.

Payne even aired in the UK – with  ITV showing it in the early hours of the morning – but it was not a success. In the Radio Times Guide To TV Comedy, author Mark Leiwsohn called it ‘a middle-of-the-road, flat-footed’ sitcom, noting that Payne ‘had none of Basil’s self-recrimination.

Caryn James, of The New York Times wrote: 'It's enough to say, that this remake of John Cleese's hilarious, farcical Fawlty Towers has been given a hackneyed Hollywood treatment’, while Canada’s Globe and Mail said the British original had been sanitised to the extent that ‘the visceral terrors of Fawlty Towers become simple misunderstandings’.

Like Amanda’s, this was pulled early, after eight episodes, with a ninth, unaired, installment in the can.

Zoom Letzten Kliff

Perhaps surprisingly, given a certain episode in which Basil mentions the war, the Germans had a go at remaking Fawlty Towers in 2001.

Retitled To The Last Cliff, it was set on a North Sea Island with Vikor and Helga Sten running the join, with hinderance from waiter Igor, who came from Kazaakhstan.

Cleese said producers RTL remade the show ‘superbly’. But although 11 of the 12 original scripts were due to be remade – unsurprisingly, The Germans episodes was the exception –  this project stalled after the pilot aired. 

Published: 8 Feb 2023